It’s Halloween again. The one night of the year when the spooky and gruesome is all around us – and the undead walk….

Here at Another Kind Of Mind, I do worry about you, my lovely readers, at this time of the year; a season when the nights are creeping in and the cold wind rattles spookily through the keyhole in the dark – and especially what with all those zombies and vampires who’ll be out on the streets tonight, just waiting to eat your brains or drink your blood when you least expect it. So, just in case you should encounter one of the undead on your travels this Halloween, I put together this handy historical guide to making sure they’re really dead… Or are they?

Modern medicine has all sorts of highly technical and complex methods of checking whether or not an individual has sadly breathed their last (and even then they don’t always get it right). Determining whether someone is dead or not isn’t always as simple as you might think.